Create a Surreal Magical Power Unleashed Scene in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to Create a Surreal Magical Power Unleashed Scene in Photoshop. This is an intermediate level Photoshop tutorial and some steps can be a bit tricky, but why not have a try!

Along the way, we will render some power/energy lines by manipulating a fire texture, which is unleashed from the angelic figure. We will also add a floating rock which is chained, and the power will try to pull the rock towards to the angelic figure in order to break it.

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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Step 1

Create a new document sized 1280px * 800px with black background. Load the Sky stock image into Photoshop, select a portion of the sky and paste it onto our document, adjust the size with free transform tool as you see fit:

Use a soft eraser to remove some parts of the sky as shown below:

Add the following 2 adjustment layers on top of the sky layer:

Black and White

Levels

Load the ground image into Photoshop, select a piece and copy and paste it onto our document, compress and perspective the selection with free transform tool, and form a ground texture for our image:

Add the following Black and White adjustment layer to the ground layer:

Use a soft eraser to remove some parts of the ground as shown below:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 2

Let’s make an angelic figure into the image – load the model image into Photoshop and select the girl:

Copy and paste the selection onto our image, resize and position it on the bottom right:

Add the following 3 adjustment layers as clipping mask for this girl layer:

Black and white

Levels

Curves

Create a new layer with the blending mode “overlay”, grab a small soft brush to paint some lights on the model as shown below:

Load the wing stock into Photoshop, move the wing onto the girl and use a soft eraser on the edge so it fades into the background:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

Load the rock image into Photoshop, select a piece of rock and move it onto our document, use a soft eraser to fade the edges, and position the rock on the centre left of the image:

Add the following 2 adjustment layer as clipping mask for this rock layer:

Levels

Curves

Load the chain image into Photoshop, use the quick selection tool to select a portion:

Copy and paste the selection onto our document, and distort and warp it with free tranform as shown below, then attach it to the bottom of the rock:

Add the following black and white adjustment layer to this chain layer:

Repeat these steps above and add another chain to the top of the rock as shown below:

Step 4

Let’s made some energy lines/particles for the image. Load the fire image into Photoshop, and select a portion of the with a 30px feather Lasso Tool:

Copy and paste the selection onto our document, warp it as shown below:

Apply the following Levels adjustments to this fire layer:

Change the blending mode of this fire layer to “Screen”:

Duplicate this fire layer a few times and merge them together (revert the blending mode to “screen” after the merge), add it to the top of the wing as shown below:

We can also use the liquify filter to warp the fire texture a bit, in order to have flowing effect which links the rock and the model:

Duplicate the liquified layer a few times for more effect:

Step 5

Let’s add some particles into the image. Again we use the Lasso Tool with 30px feather to select a portion as shown below:

Copy and paste the selection onto our image, and apply the following Levels adjustment to it:

Change the layer blending mode to “screen” for this particle layer, and here is the effect so far:

Add the particles to different parts of the image as shown below, adjust its angel and shape with the free transform tool: